Lecture 12:
The Crisis of Democracy

The symptoms of a crisis of the democratic order could be
felt since before the war. What has driven this crisis?
Capitalism's and the proletariat's parallel increase and
concentration. Economic life, the economic forces of the
countries, have passed into the hands of these two great
powers, beside which the State has acquires a role, not as
arbiter, but as mediator. The conflicts, the contrasts between
one force and the other, have not been able to be solved by
State save by deals, direct agreements between them. In those
deals, the State has but played the role of mender. Within the
old society's forms the forms of a new society were
incubated. The nation, by virtue of the new social reality,
has ceased to be a predominantly political entity, to become a
predominantly economic entity. This change in the nation's
substance has determined the crisis of the political
State. History shows us that a society's forms of social and
political organization correspond with the structire, with the
tendency of the productive forces. Bourgeois society, for
example, no origin other than the birth of industry. Within
Medieval society, the bouegoisie was the industrial class, the
artisan class. As the bourgeoise grew richer, as industry
grew, the privileges of the aristrocracy, of the nobility,
became unbearable. The laborer and the bourgeois were mixed at
that time into a single class: the people. The bourgeoisie was
the people's vanguard and it was the class which led the
revolution. Laborer and bourgeois coincided in the wish to
abolish the aristocracy's privileges. Thus, the fall of the
aristocracy, of the Medieval order, more than by abstract
reasons of ideology, was determined by concrete reasons in the
emergence of a new form of production: industry. New forms of
production have been created under the democratic order, the
bourgeois order. Industry has developed extraordinarily,
pushed along by the machine. Huge industrial enterprises have
emerged. The expansion of these new productive forces does not
allow the old political molds to endure. It has transformed
the structure of nations and demands a transformation in the
democratic order's structure. Bourgeois democracy has ceased
to correspond with the organization of the productive forces
which have changed and grown formidably. That's why democracy
is in crisis. Democracy's typical institution is the
parliament. The crisis of democracy is a crisis of
parliament. We have already seen how the two great
contemporary forces are capital and labor and how, beyond
parliament, these forces clash or struggle. Democracy's
theorists might suppose that these forces are, or should be,
proportionaly represented in parliament. But it is not
so. Because society is not split cleanly between capitalists
and proletarians. Between the capitalist class and the
proletarian class there are a series of amorphous and
intermediary layers. Besides, just as the whole proletarian
class does not have a precise awareness of its historical and
class necessities, the whole of the capitalist class is not
gifted with a precise class consciousness. The mentality of
the big industrialist or the banker is not the same as the
mentality of the medium rentier or retail merchant. This
disperison of social classes is reflected in parliament which
thus does not exactly reflect the large interests in play. The
political State turns out to be the representation of the all
the social layers. But the conservative force and the
revolutionary force polarize into singular interest groupings:
capitalism and proletariat. Within the parliamentary order
there cannot be but coalition governments. Today, the tendency
is toward factional governments.

Currently, the intensification of the class struggle, the
expansion of social warfare, has accented this crisis of
democracy. The proletariat attempts the decisive assault on
the State and political power in order to transform
society. Its growth in the parliaments is threatening to the
bourgeoisie. Democracy's legal instruments have turned out to
be insufficient for preserving the democratic order.
Conservatism has needed to turn to illegal action, to
extra-legal methods. The middle class, society's intermediate
and heterogeneous zone, has been the nerve center of this
movement. Lacking a class consciousness of its own, the
middle class feels itself equally distant from, and inimical
to capitalism and the proletariat. But within it are
represented some capitalist sectors. And, as the current
battle is waged between capital and the proletariat, all
intervention from a third element must operate to the benefit
of the conservative class. Capitalism and the proletariat are
two great and singular camps of gravitation which draw-in the
scattered forces. Whosoever reacts against the proletariat
serves capitalism. This falls to the middle class, from whose
ranks the fascist movement has recruited its proselytism.
Fascism is not an Italian phenomenon, it is an international
phenomenon. The first European country in which fascism
appeared was Italy because in Italy the class struggle was in
a sharper period, because in Italy the revolutionary situation
was most violent and decisisve.